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The Homecoming Seasons: An Irish Catholic Returns to a Changing Long Island is a deeply moving memoir of a returning native's re-experience of his childhood community. After many years abroad as a graduate student at Cambridge, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand, and as a country program director of health care and agricultural programs in central Africa, James MacGuire returned to New York and spent most of the 1980s at Time Inc., Macmillan and the Manhattan Institute.
In 1990 he married and several years later, with a second child on the way, he and his wife decamped from Manhattan for a small enclave called the Isle of Wight in the village of Lawrence on the south shore of Long Island, where MacGuire had grown up.
This book tells the story of MacGuire's return to this world-how it had evolved from ancient times; been inhabited by indigenous peoples; colonized by the Dutch and English; and then grew from a sparsely populated agricultural corner of western Long Island to an early summer resort, then an outer, and, finally, an inner suburb of New York City.
Jamie MacGuire skillfully weaves memories of his childhood in this almost hidden world with sketches of his family and their friends before updating his account with a lovingly detailed, diary-like depiction of returning. His parents' friends now much older, the community more diverse, as he, his wife and children make new friends as they proceed into this changed world. He captures in cinematic detail the wonder of the wetlands and surrounding natural world, the poignant life, death and rebirth of community, the joys and sorrows of marriage and parenthood, and the profound exultation of safely shepherding two beloved sons to triumphant adulthood.
This is an uplifting literary memoir that will earn and deserve the widest possible audience.
List of contents
Author's Note
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: The Isle of Wight
Chapter 3: Early Years, 1994-1997
Chapter 4: Looking Back at the Sixties
Chapter 5: High Hopes/ Steep Struggles
Chapter 6: Losses, 2001-2004
Chapter 7: A New Chapter, 2005-2008
Chapter 8: Passages
Chapter 9: Superstorm Sandy
Chapter 10: Lanie, 2013-2015
Chapter 11: Renewal, 2016
Chapter 12: Pierce and Alex
Chapter 13: Twenty-five Years and Moving On
Chapter 14: Envoi
Index
About the Author
About the author
Portsmouth Institute (information for James MacGuire)
285 Cory's Lane
Portsmouth, Rhode Island 02871-1352
401.643.1244
jmacguire@portsmouthabbey.org
